Has anyone else noticed this? does anyone know exactly why RAM sticks are so expensive now, they just shot up more $$ in the past week. 16GB you could get for 89$ for the usual high quality brands like Corsiar/Gskill/Kingston ect around xmas and of course after christman you'd expect prices to go back to original pricing after all the sales and what not which was around 109$. Try getting a 16GB pair for under $120 now. Was around 117 for gskill ripjaws and corsair vengence, now upto 125$ so does anyone know what exactly is causing this massive spike in RAM pricing? Even 8GB is like 70$ now.

It was noticed a couple of months ago on the /r/BuildaPC subreddit, with statistical data from PCPartPicker to confirm. When I built my PC back in February 2012 I got my 4GBX2 G.SKILL DDR3 1600MHz for only $45. The same RAM now costs ~$65.

Maybe China is limiting production to artificially increase prices because China Don't Care

P.S. I actually have no idea.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think one of the major manufacturers went under. Plus, a lot of memory makers are focusing on making RAM for mobile devices, so supply for traditional dekstop RAM is not as high as it was previously.

Maybe people are just excited about Daft Punk?

Wasn't there concerns that the Japanese Tsuanami from a few years ago would cause certain PC parts (RAM being one of them) to go up in price right about now? Makes sense, If there were manufacturers that were effected and if there was a gap in production, for us to just be seeing the effects now, right?

Somebody, please, correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like this was a story line at the time. Obviously a small one, since people were in crisis and such, but I do vaguely remember hearing that. Like, from Tom Merritt at Twit or something.

@shinboy630: That's what I've heard too. Seems reasonable enough.

There has been a shift in production priority from Desktop memory to SODIMM and Mobile device memory, as such there's less to go around.

@dfsvegas: Pretty sure that was the Thailand flood

I can get 16GB of ram for $120? That's insane!

I remember when a couple of MBs was hundreds of dollars.You kids are spoiled

I like dis ansa

Yeah this has been going on for quite a while

@mildmolasses please dont look at the harddrive prices then, you might get a heart attack, old man ;)

@mildmolasses said:

I purchased 8 GB of RAM for $45 about a year and a half ago, and since then prices on that same RAM have increased by 60%. That's not supposed to happen. If anything they should have decreased by that much. :p

That would be referring to the Thailand floods of 2011. Much of the world's hard drive manufacturing occurs there, and the floods wiped a lot of that out.

You buy ram once... I don't see the problem with current prices.

@sins_of_mosin: I don't do this personally, but a lot of people build new PCs every 6 to 12 months.

That would take a load of gravity capitalizing. Where are they gonna get the money?

Oh noooooo... I've put off buying ram for so long, maybe I missed my chance when they were stupid cheap....

China has been going through a spate of economic reforms in order to bolster the transition of more of the country's population into the middle class. A couple large corporations which for years have been able to get away with extremely low wages and poor conditions are starting to be taken to task over these and other issues.

These coupled with the more immediate realization of the tsunami predictions are probably what is driving prices up right now.

On one hand, that's still not that bad considering ye olden days.

On the other, goddammit. I'm going to be buying 8 gigs soon, and I could have bought them a month ago when I started piecemealing my new PC.

hyperbole much?

For anybody who is curious, he's referring to this article in PCPartPicker that was published back in March: http://pcpartpicker.com/blog/ram-price-increasing

I was marely asking this question because I planed on building a machine in feburary this year, so naturally I had been looking into all kinds of hardware from around christmas onwards, and with life, and certain delays I have been unable to build it yet. I've been keeping tabs of pricing and such because I'm like "okay getting new PC this month" and so on and so on, delay after delay lol.... but still keeping tabs on the pricing of all the hardware I want, and the RAM has constantly been increasing, at the rate its going it'll hit 150$ for 16GB soon which is more then double what it was 6 months ago. The flooding was mostly harddrives, thats what it took such a long time for simple 1TB harddrives to drop under 100$. The most common sense was what was mentioned supply vs demand, with everything going mobile but I didn't know if anyone on here had any different or concrete news as to exactly why the RAM isn't stabilizing in price and jumping 5-7$ every two weeks or so. Thanks for the replies peeps.

As for the motherboard costing several 100 few years ago, errrr... mobo's still do!! if you want a high performance one, and you could still buy a mobo for under 100 6 yrs ago as is whats in my current old build. Not over hyping this, I just would like to know what is causing the massive price spike? if it'll stabilize any time soon? how much do we expect it to reach before it levels out? I'm not spoiled, just on an extremely tight budget and god knows when I would be able to buy a new PC again so looking for it to last!!! and I do a lot of video rendering/encoding and photoshop so that is why 8GB isn't enough for me or I would obviously just go with a simply 8GB stick.

Damn, i thought ram was looking a lot more expensive than i remembered. I was gonna get some new ram, but not at these prices.

@troll93: You know..joking aside that might be a reason for the increase

I recall paying $400 for 256M (or 512M?) back in the early 90s. There is cycle on most hardware pricing. If PC sales are down, they won't manufacturer as much, means the cost will go up. I think there has been a lag in PC sales. Could also be more competition from other countries for silicon resources to build RAM, etc, making the prices go up. Lastly: inflation. Interest rates are rumored to be going up, making our cash worth less than it is currently.